Brian Stone, conductor

"Conductor Brian Stone had everyone’s attention." (Boston Globe) "The hero was conductor Brian Stone …[who] galvanized the Boston Conservatory Orchestra and made musical sense of every bar." (Boston Phoenix) Such was the critical response to Mr. Stone’s performance of Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts at the Boston Conservatory.

Brian began his musical career playing the saxophone in the public schools of Santa Monica, California. Already an exceptional player as a youth, he went on to win several competitions. Later, he took up viola and piano, and started composing as well. Stone is a graduate of Bennington College in Vermont, where he studied composition, viola, and literature. Further studies in composition took place at the Aspen Music Festival where he conducted his own work, “Nesting.”

Dr. Stone received a Master of Music Degree and a Doctorate in conducting from the Peabody Conservatory where he studied with Frederik Prausnitz and Gustav Meier. Additional studies in conducting took place at Le Domaine Forget with Otto-Werner Mueller and two summers at the Festival at Sandpoint with Gunther Schuller. His musical career has included work with many notable musicians including Bethany Beardslee, George Perle, Eddie Daniels, Gary Burton, Karel Husa, Elliot Schwartz, Robert Page, Leon Fleisher, Marc Neikrug, Marvin Hamlisch. Leonard Slatkin, and Gerard Schwarz.

In 1999, Brian was one of six conductors chosen to participate in the National Conductor Preview with the Utah Symphony. In 2008 he received the prestigious Jessie B. DuPont Award in Music Education in recognition of his work and in 2009 he was awarded the “First Honours Diploma” in the 29th MasterPlayers Music Competition.

In a decade as Director of University of Delaware Orchestras, Stone developed a three-ensemble area of orchestral activities that doubled the enrollment, tripled the number of performances, and quadrupled the audience. Award-winning, sophisticated programs ranging from Baroque to Contemporary, and Classics to Jazz, Broadway and Hollywood were initiated in collaborations with faculty and guest soloists, choral groups, composers, guest conductors and opera. In 2009 the UD Symphony was invited for the first time in their history to perform at the Music Educator’s National Conference convention.

Stone has conducted professional orchestras in Indiana, Utah, Maryland, Florida, Alaska, Washington, Connecticut, Germany, Hungary and Bulgaria, and students at The University of Maryland, The Johns Hopkins University, Ohio University, Boston Conservatory, University of Mobile, San Diego State University, Stanford University, the National Conservatory of Colombia, The Catholic University of America and the All-State Honor Orchestras of Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Southern California.

“Stone was highly impressive in the way he energized Schumann’s repetitions and brought excellent control to those pesky shifts of mood.” (Spokane Spokesman-Review)